Biography
Kathleen Sands is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa and previously directed the Study of Religion Program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Her research, which centers on religion in American public life, has been supported by fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Harvard’s Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. She has served on the editorial boards of the
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion,
Journal of Law and Religion, and the
American Quarterly, and published in a range of academic venues, including
Journal of the American Academy of Religion,
New Literary History,
American Indian Law Review,
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and
Culture and Religion. She is the author of
Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology (Fortress, 1990), editor of
God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life (Oxford, 2000), and author of
America’s Religious Wars: The Embattled Heart of Our Public Life (Yale, 2019). Her present book project (
What’s Wrong with Religious Freedom?) contests the predominant discourses of religious liberty in contemporary U.S. law and politics.
Candidate Statement
The American Academy of Religion has been my professional home since 1990. At AAR Annual Meetings, I nervously delivered my first papers and received generous encouragement. There, too, I met in the flesh people whose work had inspired my career. And there, ever since, I’ve spun networks of collaboration and affection with senior scholars, peers, and upcoming colleagues.
My official roles in the AAR began at the regional level, where I was sequentially section chair, vice president, president, coordinator of a tri-regional meeting, and regional secretary. At the national level, I served on the AAR’s Board of Directors, Regions Committee, Academic Relations Task Force, and Research Grants Jury. I also have co-chaired two program units (Women and Religion; Law, Religion and Culture) and reviewed two others (Religion in Popular Culture; Gay Men’s Issues in Religion) for the AAR Program Committee.
I think of the AAR as a place to practice hope in an imperiled world. Because we are faced with so much injustice and catastrophe, hope today is better understood as a virtue to be cultivated than as a feeling or expectation. Hope is practiced in the teeth of the hardest questions, and religion, for me, is where those questions can be found.
The mission of the AAR, as we know, is to foster the public understanding of religion and promote excellence in the academic study of religion. This is how we as a guild practice hope. But our practice must be skillfully adapted to who, where, and when we are. As the recent report of our Futures Task Force firmly reiterates, the AAR remains committed both to scholarly excellence and the repair of the world. The report particularly urges us to ameliorate the precarity and suffering of the world as instantiated in our own members. It observes that although the AAR best serves tenured and tenure-track professionals, this constituency is only 35% of our membership. The situations of those who labor as adjunct faculty, contingent faculty, applied religious practitioners, independent scholars, and students are typical rather than exceptional. Nor is it atypical for members to experience marginalization in society and even in the AAR itself, based on factors such as race, religion, class, sexuality, disability, and gender. Concretely, this means that many of our members, perhaps most, struggle with problems such as financial insecurity, physical danger, under-employment or unemployment, not to mention dignitary harms of all sorts.
To repair these wounds is a tall order but there is plenty we can do, as the report shows. Suggestions include making the AAR board more representative of our constituencies, creating more 365 elements (e.g., online workshops on topics such as anti-racism, pedagogy, and publication), replacing institutional affiliation on our name-tags with research interests, and systematically expanding our employment services into relevant non-academic careers. I’d be honored to serve in the AAR’s leadership as it pursues these and other means to study religion for the repair of the world.